IBM Greenock, Dec. 2008

IBM built it's first factory in Spango Valley, Greenock, in 1951; initially making typewriters, printers and other office equipment, the factory began making PCs in 1981. As production of these shfted overseas, IBM Greenock shifted to making servers and laptops.

IBM sold much of it's hardware manufacturing to Lenovo and Sanmina, who ran the plant in Greenock until 2006 before pulling out and shifting production to Hungary. 2000 IBM employees still work at IBM Greenock, mostly in a call centre, but the huge manufacturing halls stand empty.

This site is absolutely huge - several football-pitch-sized halls, some on top of each other, linked by enormous corridors and 4.5km of conveyors. I walked over a kilometre end to end - much further with all the diversions. It felt strangely familiar - a long time ago, I was a mainframe systems programmer for IBM...

One production hall:



One of the never-ending corridors:



Loads of elderly laptops still lie scattered about:



Lots of offices still have equipment and paperwork:



Lots of big bits of equipment were also left:



Reception was still neat and tidy:



Security was a bit lax:



Boxloads of components were sitting about:



It felt very festive in places:



The giant automated warehouse:



Which they were very proud of:



I took the obligatory self-portrait:



Part of the dispatch area:



Some places, it looks like they left in a hurry:



A giant strongroom was used to hold processors and memory chips:



Demolition looks imminent:



In the offices, a typical nerd's desk:



And a bunch of old-school Psions:



In the canteen was this - I think it was some kind of artwork:



And this was for the posh customers:



There are lots more pictures in my Flickr set...

That place looks well mint, cool stuff

good to see it has not been pikeyd out.

Great pictures, sad to see so much stuff going to waste. That old laptop looks familiar...... oh, theres one under my desk I rest my feet on !

T

Been past there on the way to the Isle of Bute but it was still in use the last time. Always fancied a peek inside and now I have. Cheers mate

Factories like this were supposed to be our great hope.

I was at the Agilent (formerly HP I think) factory in South Queensferry recently for work. It has huge hi-tech and spotless production areas of the kind you used to see in textbooks but they are all empty. All they do there now is sales and customer service.

RichardB said:

Factories like this were supposed to be our great hope.

I was at the Agilent (formerly HP I think) factory in South Queensferry recently for work. It has huge hi-tech and spotless production areas of the kind you used to see in textbooks but they are all empty. All they do there now is sales and customer service.

Click to expand...

Not quite just sales and customer service! I know that as a good friend of mine works there supporting the IT systems.

RichardB said:

Factories like this were supposed to be our great hope.

I was at the Agilent (formerly HP I think) factory in South Queensferry recently for work. It has huge hi-tech and spotless production areas of the kind you used to see in textbooks but they are all empty. All they do there now is sales and customer service.

Click to expand...

used to be a Small wafer fab producing early micro chips but to small to survive, not sure it was HP though but could be wrong ?

My Dad work for IBM for over 30 years & got to visit here at least once.

We still have a coaster around which was a freebee from a conferance.

He had a few thinkpads for work just like the one in the picture. We kept one of the older ones because it was too outdated for IBM to want it back.